In an article for the Daily Beast called "How Colleges Dupe Students," Kathleen Kingsbury cautions would-be college students to be on guard against the ever-deceptive college tour. The title articulates the “buyer beware” sentiment I often hear in the popular press. For instance, I recently came across a testimony that would probably make for the most awkward commencement speech on the planet. (An Orange County, CA man buried in student loans said he wished he had gone to prison instead of college.) 

Just today, I searched “college + nightmare” in Google, which returned an article about the anxiety families feel when confronting college costs. I went for broke and tried “college is a terrible mistake” and, happily, nothing’s come back—yet.

What makes Dupe any different from these other cautionary tales? Most of the articles I have found deal primarily with the woes and hazards of financing a college education. Yet, this article in the Beast supports the notion that the admissions process itself is laden with traps, trickery, and people who just don’t care. 

The usual message out there is that the college admission process is mysterious. Sure, it is for some. Murky? Unless you were living in a cave for the past year, murky’s been the watchword. But an elaborate “charade” set on “fleecing” you (read: “out to screw you”)? This rings false to me.

I have to agree in part with the basic theme of the article: campus tours, like viewbooks and open houses, do not perfectly reflect the day-to-day reality of campus life.

However, there is a difference between exaggerating what is already positive and genuine on a campus for the sake of making a good impression and Kingsbury’s claim that colleges are guilty of swindling and fooling visitors. In other words, if a campus tour guide is setting unreasonable expectations through deceit, then a spade’s a spade and a charlatan she is.  But if she is presenting her institution in the best light, mitigating the negative factors, and truthfully serving as a model student, though not necessarily the “average student,” then she is indeed doing honest work.

Notwithstanding the fact that the article is poorly constructed in that many of the contributors’ comments are utterly off the topic of how to “see [a] college for what it really is,” one of my main concerns with this piece is that it lumps diverse institutions together and draws conclusions in broad strokes. Yes, there are some institutions that fit the description offered by Kingsbury, but certainly not all of us.

I honestly feel that the college I work for, Rhodes College, provides an exemplary campus visit experience because we are part of an exceptional institution with honorable representatives who care deeply for the campus. We give our student volunteers reasonable guidelines, not scripts. We want them to share narratives, not tell stories. We mean it when we encourage our prospective families to spend genuine one-on-one time with our students and faculty. And there are indeed many more institutions like mine out there.

Ms. Kingsbury, you may now return fire. Or better yet, come by my campus for a visit to see how it’s really done.